Xechran

Bingo! Thank you. "Early Earth Observation" is the program I am working on, and requires the OrbitRecover flag. No contract in it satisfies that flag. "Crewed Spaceplane" is a later program and its contracts are unavailable to me. However, the "Crewed Orbit" program which I cannot accept does still allow access to its "Reach Orbit and Return" contract. It looks like it is visually flagged as acceptable, but I am unable to see the flag (vision issues). This would be why others could do this and I could not. I find it odd that you cannot complete a sputnik/luna/explorer program without first sending men in to space. Progression seems counter intuitive.

A bit confused, and unable to find a contract that I need for progression in the Early Observation Satellite program. The Dedicated Earth Observation Satellite (basic film payload) contract requires completion of "First Orbit Recovery" before it can be accepted. I have recovered numerous orbiting science payloads, so I think I am looking for a contract to accept. Except I can't find anything that matches. What am I missing? I presume it is something nakedly apparent such that everyone is completing this without difficulty, which is why I can't find anything about this in a search.

Absolutely maddening. Im playing along in the new career mode and my game starts breaking after adding a few mods. Ships start losing focus in flight after reverting to launch or loading a save etc. I do a binary search through the mods to narrow it down and its this one. I painstakingly detail and document the exact conditions/parts to reproduce the error and come to report my findings. Its already fixed! Blarhg. You... stupid, Stupid Chris. Also thanks.

I wonder if you realize that Iad is the guy who maintained DRE? Hes not coming in out of the darkness here.

This should explain things clear as mud. Hrm, how do I tell it to start an embedded at a certain point...

Actually what I meant was the 3.75 meter part gets stepped down to size 3 rather than rounded up to size 4. A 3.9 meter part - should you find one lying on the roadside - is size 3. I'm kind caught off guard a bit because when I read the wiki the impression I got was the engine only supported node size arguments up to size 2 (still newb-ish dont flog me!) and Im trying to figure out what sizes I should edit into various parts, since their authors kindly left their sizes at default.

So we should use a step function rather than rounding?

I followed your post here from the DR thread last night, checked the wiki and it says node attachment size range is 0 for half meter, 1 for the mid size 1.25 meter, and 2 for the 2.5 meter nodes. The size parameter is optional and it assumes 1 if no value is given... I'm poking around in KW and it seems like a lot of things dont have a node size specified. The service engine, for example, is given node size 2 but the griffonXX "the largest engine available" doesnt have a size specified, so its actually only size 1? name = KW3mengineGriffonXX description = The most powerful engine availible, capable of launching large rockets without the aid of solid boosters or additional cores at the cost of fuel efficiency. // --- node definitions --- node_stack_top = 0.0, 2.808, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.491, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 The 3.75 and 6.25 meter heat shields in deadly are also set to size 1 if Im reading this all right. // --- node definitions --- // definition format is Position X, Position Y, Position Z, Up X, Up Y, Up Z node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.4548836, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -1.02125, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 Seems like I may have a date with GVim.

Erm, about the "deadly" in the deadly reentry. I recently had an unintended SCIENCE! opportunity. I was aerobraking in kerbin's atmo on a return trip from the Mun and came up just a few meters/second short of bringing the periapsis out of the atmosphere. I turned RCS on... only to find I had neglected to include a monopropellant tank in my build. I got my kerbal out to push... and ran him out of rcs fuel. At this point in the comedy of errors I switched back to the ship with the second kerbal on board and simply ran it into the ground. It didnt have a heat shield, but rotating and flipping it around was enough to bring it to the ground at 140 meters a second. Everything was still working before it splashed. Slowly asking myself, "Wheres the kaboom? There was supposed to be a Kerbal kooking kaboom!" I went back to the tracking center. Poor Archibald had separated from the craft enough that physics turned off and he was orbiting nicely at 60 km. Determined to see at least some aerial fireworks tonight I loaded him up and watched his descent. Right clicked and brought up the temperature gauge to act as a kind of count down to Fun. -60c, 0c, 100c, 200c, 300c (wow still smiling), 400c, 500c, 600c, 700c, 800c, 900c, almost 1000c! Bastard is still grinning like the damn Cheshire cat, talk about keeping it cool. Not only does he fly, he bounces?! I see now that much is fixed in 2.3 The part thats eating me is how well rotating the ship itself worked and why. The problem is that everything cooled off too quickly as it rotated away. Flipping end over end around 40 rpm the ship cooked up to about 700 only to chil down to normal as the section went retrograde. Is there a mod that alters heat retention/dissipation or a value somewhere I can alter to do so?

I grabbed that and added it to the deadlyreentry.cfg file: @PART[MissingHeatSHield] { @maxTemp = 1700 MODULE { // this is a copy paste of the mk1 pod ablative shielding. name = ModuleHeatShield direction = 0, -1, 0 // bottom of pod reflective = 0.05 // 5% of heat is ignored at correct angle ablative = AblativeShielding loss { // loss is based on the shockwave temperature (also based on density) key = 650 0 // start ablating at 650 degrees C key = 1000 64 // peak ablation at 1000 degrees C key = 3000 80 // max ablation at 3000 degrees C } dissipation { // dissipation is based on the part's current temperature key = 300 0 // begin ablating at 300 degrees C key = 500 180 // maximum dissipation at 500 degrees C } } RESOURCE { name = AblativeShielding amount = 250 maxAmount = 250 } } I think it needs a bit of tweaking to accommodate the 1-2 pod. Maybe a touch more ablation? It has run out of ablation resource every time I've tested it, regardless of whether I survive or not. Also, for some reason every part on my ship is being listed as IsShielded: False. Ship is just a parachute a pod and a shield with the shield held retrograde. Ablation is working on the shield, shield's heat spikes after ablation wears out, and the other components are holding together so I don't know if it matters.